David Ferguson reports on the latest from the great Republican hope:
In a scene that could have come from outtakes of MTV’s popular reality series “Jersey Shore,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) was caught by cameras bellowing and storming up the boardwalk in the popular vacation town Seaside Heights, NJ after a man in the crowd insulted him. The footage, shot with a phone camera and distributed by TMZ, shows Christie shouting angrily until a member of his entourage leads him away.
The video initially showed Christie standing athwart the flow of the crowd, yelling at a man off-camera.
“You’re a real big-shot!” shouted the governor, clutching an ice cream cone, “You’re a real big-shot, shooting your mouth off!”
“Nah, just take care of the teachers,” the man said before walking away.
“Yeah, keep walkin’ away,” Christie jeered at him, “Keep walkin’!”
At least he didn’t start screaming “stop raping people.” But it wouldn’t surprise me if he did.
And by the way, this was shot with a phone and it doesn’t look like there were very many people around, so this wasn’t for the cameras. He really is like this.
Three Years into the Recovery, Job Growth for Women Undermined by Public Sector Job Losses, NWLC Analysis Shows
Analysis by the National Women’s Law Center of jobs data for June 2012 shows that last month women gained more private sector jobs than men did: 49,000 v. 35,000. But women lost 17,000 public sector jobs in June, while men gained 13,000 public sector jobs. Since the start of the recovery three years ago, women have gained 908,000 net private sector jobs—and lost 396,000 net public sector jobs. Men have gained 2,304,000 net private sector jobs—and lost 231,000 net public sector jobs. In the last three years, women have a net gain of 512,000 jobs; men have a net gain of 2,073,000 jobs.
“The June jobs data reflect a disturbing trend we’ve seen during the three years of the recovery: cuts in public sector jobs are undermining the recovery overall—but especially for women,” said Joan Entmacher, Vice President for Family Economic Security at the National Women’s Law Center. “For every ten private sector jobs women have gained since the recovery began in June 2009, they’ve lost more than four public sector jobs. Our communities are losing teachers, nurses, police and firefighters but some policy makers still don’t get it. They’re pushing for deeper budget cuts that will mean more lost jobs, more cuts in education, health care, public safety, and other vital services.”
The public sector is heavily female and African American. Why?
Historically, the state and local public sectors have provided more equitable opportunities for women and people of color. As a result, women and African Americans constitute a disproportionately large share of the state and local public-sector workforce.
State and local public-sector workers of color face smaller wage disparities across racial lines, and at some levels of education actually enjoy a wage premium over similarly educated white workers.
The disproportionate share of women and African Americans working in state and local government has translated into higher rates of job loss for both groups in these sectors. Between 2007 (before the recession) and 2011, state and local governments shed about 765,000 jobs. Women and African Americans comprised about 70 percent and 20 percent, respectively, of those losses. Conversely, Hispanic employment in state and local public-sector jobs increased during this period (although most of that increase occurred in the lowest-paid jobs).
I had to go to the DMV recently and it was very efficient. But as I was waiting (about ten minutes) I listened to a couple sitting sitting next to me complaining about the DMV clerks being fat, lazy, stupid etc. They were speaking specifically about the African American women who were at the information desk.
I have always thought that a good part of the hostility toward public workers in recent years was related to factors that have nothing to do with their pensions. The problem, at least in part, probably has to do with the “wrong” people having secure, decently paying jobs that they don’t “deserve” which are paid for by taxes. Same old shit.
Joe Weisenthal first caught that over 100,000 teaching jobs have been cut in the last year. It’s not that parents no longer demand teachers for their children, it’s that state government cutbacks have led to this specific job loss, and the federal government has not taken up the slack since 2010. If you go back to June 2008, teacher jobs have fallen by 300,000.
Such cuts obviously have perilous effects for the nation’s education system and long-term economic health, but it hurts the economy in the short-term too. Teachers are disproportionately women, so the cuts affect a subset of worker that already faces significant disadvantages in the American workplace, and these losses no doubt played a role in the recession’s out-sized impact on female workers.
It continues to be striking that a disproportionate share of the jobs being created are going to men. This is not due to the comeback of manufacturing and construction. Since December of 2009, manufacturing has added just 496,000 and construction has lost 145,000 jobs. The real story is that men have gotten a hugely disproportionate share of the jobs in industries with more of a gender balance.
For example, in retail since December of 2009, men have gotten 474,000 jobs while women have lost 49,000. Men have gotten 190,000 of the 192,000 jobs created in transportation. In finance they have seen an increase in employment of 123,000 while the number of jobs for women fell by 65,000. It is too early to know if this trend will continue, but the disproportionate growth of jobs for men in these and other areas over the last two and a half years is striking.
I can’t blame men for taking whatever jobs are available. But those numbers are startling. Women are being hit very hard in this “recovery.”
The discovery of a fantastically preserved, bushy-tailed fossil theropod has cloaked the dinosaur world in feathers.
Named Sciurumimus — Latin for “squirrel-mimic” — albersdoerferi, the dinosaur lived 150 million years ago in what is now Germany. When it died, it came to rest in sediments so fine-grained that they preserved an almost photographic impression of the filaments covering its body.
Other feathered theropods, the taxonomic clade including all two-legged dinosaurs and their bird descendants, have been found previously, inspiring fantastic artist renditions and speculation that plumes rather than scales were the dinosaur norm.
Those fossils, however, belonged to a relative latecomer group known as coelurosaurs. Whether most theropods were feathered, or just a few recent evolutionary offshoots, was an open question. The new fossil find, described July 3 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and led by paleontologist Oliver Rauhut of Germany’s Ludwig Maximilian University, gives a resounding answer.
Compared to the coelurosaurs, S. albersdoerferi was “significantly more basal in the evolutionary tree of theropods,” or a trunk rather than a branch, wrote Rauhut and colleagues. If it had feathers, so did the rest of the theropods.
Some people believe that if a bearded guy in the sky didn’t hand-fashion all living beings from dust, the world would lose its sense of wonder. As for me, knowing all my childhood and Hollywood conceptions of dinosaurs were wrong, and that my cockatiel and lovebird aren’t just feathered dinosaurs but more like actual dinosaurs with significant adaptions–that is a source of wonderment far greater than any monolithic supernatural entity could create.
In another testament to the power of progressive leadership, the California State Senate just approved major funding for a high-speed rail project that will eventually connect San Francisco all the way down to San Diego with super fast, efficient trains. The vote was close–a bare minimum of 21-16–though it’s likely that some legislators were given permission to vote no because they face reelection in tough districts.
The bill now moves to the desk of governor Jerry Brown, who will almost certainly sign it.
This is a huge victory for progressives, thanks in large part to an influx of progressive legislators and the courage and tireless energy of activists across the state.
However much the big money boys may own and operate Washington, D.C., progressive states can still lead the charge toward a better future. It would be nice to get these things done at a federal level, but if red states have to dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century (or even the 20th), then so be it. It’s been that way for the last 100 years, and it’s not going to change anytime soon.
Ooops. Lousiana GOP discovers that America has more than one religion
by digby
Guess what? Some of those Louisiana politicians who voted to give public education funds to religious schools are having second thoughts. But not for the reasons we might have hoped.
Valarie Hodges admitted that when she supported Governor Bobby Jindal’s school voucher program, she only did so because she assumed the religious school vouchers could only be used for Christian schools. Religious freedom means that everyone’s free to follow Valarie Hodges’ religion! She explains,
I actually support funding for teaching the fundamentals of America’s Founding Fathers’ religion, which is Christianity, in public schools or private schools. I liked the idea of giving parents the option of sending their children to a public school or a Christian school. (read on …)
I would guess that most immigrants taking the citizenship test undertand just how Un-American that is. Fundamentally Un-American.
Still, I think it makes some sense in her world. After all, they get their information about the Constitution from pseudo-historian charlatans like David Barton:
Last week we wrote another post in our on-going series highlighting social and governmental institutional that David Barton claims came directly out of the Bible. And today we found a presentation that Barton delivered last month where he once again made all of these now standard claims, but this time with the additional claim that the Constitution’s provision regarding treason “is a verbatim quote out of Ezekiel 18:20”
Here is Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.
The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted.
And here is Ezekiel 18:20:
The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.
You’d think at least the Bible people would be offended, but apparently not.
The far right has been brainwashed into thinking that America was intended to be an explicitly Christian nation. (Sometimes they’ll agree that the Jews have a claim as well.) But even if one is now thoroughly confused about what “free exercise” of religion means due to the shiny new “liberty” argument, one would think that the Constitution is still clear on the establishing part: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” But then I suppose that anyone who can believe that the Bible says “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them” verbatim isn’t going to be dissuaded by the plain words in the Constitution.
The former top director at Progress Energy Inc. blasted merger partner Duke Energy Corp.’s quick change of CEOs after the deal closed, calling it “an incredible act of bad faith.”
The comments, in a letter sent to the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, came after Duke’s board removed former Progress Chief Executive Bill Johnson from his post atop the combined company just hours after he started the job. The board then replaced him with Jim Rogers, who was Duke’s CEO before the merger.
Mr. Johnson, 58 years old, had been slated to be CEO of the combined company since January 2011, when Duke and Progress announced their $26 billion merger. In fact, it was written into the merger agreement that he would take the top job.
“This was a critical element in the merger deliberations of our Board,” John Mullin, former lead director of Progress, said in the letter. “I do not believe that a single director of Progress would have voted for this transaction as structured with the knowledge that the CEO of Duke, Jim Rogers, would remain as the CEO of the combined company.”
Duke has said Mr. Johnson left by mutual agreement with the board.
In an interview Friday, Mr. Mullin accused former Duke directors who dominate the newly merged board of reneging on their commitment to make Mr. Johnson CEO of the combined enterprise.
“Being the CEO for a very short period of time and then being asked to resign so the former CEO could become CEO, that was not our understanding of what it meant for Bill to be CEO of the combined company,” he said.
As reported in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Johnson signed his employment contract on June 27, and it went into effect on July 2 when the deal closed. That afternoon, the new board, about two-thirds of which was made up by former Duke directors, met and decided Mr. Johnson needed to be removed from the top job, people familiar with the matter said…
Here’s the kicker:
Despite his short-lived tenure, Mr. Johnson will receive exit payments worth as much as $44.4 million, according to Duke. That includes $7.4 million in severance, a nearly $1.4 million cash bonus, a special lump-sum payment worth up to $1.5 million and accelerated vesting of his stock awards, according to a Duke regulatory filing Tuesday night. Mr. Johnson gets the lump-sum payment as long as he cooperates with Duke and doesn’t disparage his former employer, the filing said.
Under his exit package, Mr. Johnson also will receive approximately $30,000 to reimburse him for relocation expenses.
Was this the deal all along? Does it matter?
My feeling is that this impulse to game the system has completely taken over the American ethos to such an extent that we now believe on some level that only a chump, a fool, wouldn’t do it. In fact, it would be wrong not to. Or at least not obviously right.
This reminds me once again of a talk I had with a lawyer friend after the Bush vs Gore decision, in which I was bemoaning the destruction of the court and the very idea of our democracy. He replied to me quite sanguinely that “Americans love winners and they admire those who figure out a way to win. It doesn’t matter how they did it, only that they did.”
I was appalled. Still clinging to some semblance of idealism, I simply thought this was over-the-top. I don’t think so anymore.. The old Vince Lombardi quote, “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” is a very American sentiment. Taken to its natural conclusion, we have these vastly wealthy players recklessly spending vast sums of money not their own as if they’re just. (Sound familiar?) And the man at the center of all this — whether a player himself or a pawn — wins big too. (He signed a self-serving contract and that makes him savvy — and thus, deserving.)
And yet there remains this requirement for a puritanical work ethic for the poor. Indeed, many people seem to believe it is they who are the culprits in this breakdown of decency and conscience.(Nothing new there, of course.)But it’s funny how it works. Poor people are losers if they even accept a government subsidy, while rich people are winners if they openly defy every norm of decent behavior and rig the system for themselves. Must be the money.
Shades of grey (austerity): remember what they did to you
by digby
In case you are wondering just why there have been such dismal job numbers and the government is doing everything it can to make it worse, here’s a handy little primer on who’s really responsible:
1. Filibustering the American Jobs Act. Last October, Senate Republicans killed a jobs bill proposed by President Obama that would have pumped $447 billion into the economy. Multiple economic analysts predicted the bill would add around two million jobs and hailed it as defense against a double-dip recession. The Congressional Budget Office also scored it as a net deficit reducer over ten years, and the American public supported the bill.
2. Stonewalling monetary stimulus. The Federal Reserve can do enormous good for a depressed economy through more aggressive monetary stimulus, and by tolerating a temporarily higher level of inflation. But with everything from Ron Paul’s anti-inflationary crusade to Rick Perry threatening to lynch Chairman Ben Bernanke, Republicans have browbeaten the Fed into not going down this path. Most damagingly, the GOP repeatedly held up President Obama’s nominations to the Federal Reserve Board during the critical months of the recession, leaving the board without the institutional clout it needed to help the economy.
3. Threatening a debt default. Even though the country didn’t actually hit its debt ceiling last summer, the Republican threat to default on the United States’ outstanding obligations was sufficient to spook financial markets and do real damage to the economy.
4. Cutting discretionary spending in the debt ceiling deal. The deal the GOP extracted as the price for avoiding default imposed around $900 billion in cuts over ten years. It included $30.5 billion in discretionary cuts in 2012 alone, costing the country 0.3 percent in economic growth and 323,000 jobs, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. Starting in 2013, the deal will trigger another $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years.
5. Cutting discretionary spending in the budget deal. While not as cataclysmic as the debt ceiling brinksmanship, Republicans also threatened a shutdown of the government in early 2011 if cuts were not made to that year’s budget. The deal they struck with the White House cut $38 billion from food stamps, health, education, law enforcement, and low-income programs among others, while sparing defense almost entirely.
There have also been a few near-misses, in which the GOP almost prevented help from coming to the economy. The Republicans in the House delayed a transportation bill that saved as many as 1.9 million jobs. House Committees run by the GOP have passed proposals aimed at cutting billions from food stamps, and the party has repeatedly threatened to kill extensions of unemployment insurance and cuts to the payroll tax.
I’m not going to blame President Obama for this. He clearly wanted something more. But I will second this from Noam Scheiber, who notes that the private sector isn’t actually fine and something more must be done:
The upshot is that we’re no longer in a world where sending states a few tens of billions of dollars to shore up their finances is going to get the recovery on track. The economy, by which I mean the private sector, is disconcertingly weak, and strengthening it is going to take something on the order of several-hundred-billion dollars.
The good news is that Obama actually has a plan of roughly that magnitude—the $450 billion American Jobs Act he proposed last September, replete with new payroll tax cuts and additional aid for the unemployed. The bad news is that, in the vein of his “private sector is doing fine” comment, we’ve heard remarkably little about this package in recent months. I’m not sure if that’s because Team Obama believes focusing on it would draw attention to how fragile the economy is at an inconvenient time in the political cycle. Or because, after three plus years of intransigence, Obama has calculated that Republicans aren’t going to abruptly drop their deal-breaking opposition. But, regardless, I think it’s the wrong strategy.
One theme that runs through numerous White House missteps these last few years is the impulse to game out what the political constraints will allow, then proceed within them, rather than start with the optimal policy and fight for as much as they can get. (The major exception was the Jobs Act … before it was shelved.) But with the unemployment rate stuck above eight percent only four months before Election Day, maybe the latter is worth a shot. Sometimes good policy really is the best politics.
To those who believe the bully pulpit is a joke and that elections are entirely decided based upon how much cash individual voters have in their pocket when they step into the voting booth, this might not be persuasive. But if you think that people do tune in to what candidates are saying at some point in the cycle and are able to reason at all, it might help at the margins if the Obama campaign went back into “it’s a do-nothing-congress, pass my jobs bill” mode. I’m fairly sure it couldn’t hurt.
And who knows? Maybe educating the public a little bit about economics in the process might just help the country stave off know-nothing austerity in the future. Again, fairly sure it won’t hurt.
you can’t have a republican government, and certainly not a constitutional democracy, amid gross material inequality.
Of course. But what’s with the tone-deaf writing style, which hides certainty in a dependent clause? And how about that flaccid-sounding “amid,”thoroughly crushed by all the Big Idea phrases on either side?
Professor Forbath urges a clearly articulated, history-based liberal alternative to the rightwing “laissez-faire” mis-readings of the Constitution. A great idea. And sure, “crackpot originalism” efficiently mincemeats Scalia, but alas, the essay is not very well organized. Who, for example, are the “revivalists” at the top of graf 8? I don’t see…oh, yes, now I get it, there they are, mentioned in the middle of a long, tortuous sentence that ends with an awkwardly-used colon: seven paragraphs and several long digressions earlier.
Our problem is not ideas – we got ’em. Our problem is not moral justice, either, or the facts – they’re on our side. Our problem is, as always, rhetoric. We are still very bad at writing crisp, compelling explanations of our ideas.
Let’s take that quote above, and do a 2 minute rewrite:
In the face of gross material inequality, a democratic republic simply can’t exist.
Not great, I agree, but I think it reads a little better. Overall, the sentence is filled with sibilants, “t’s” and plosives – tough sounds. “In the face of” posits a confrontation and focuses the homonyn potential of “gross”so that it better implies personal revulsion (the sight of a “gross face”) at the enormous (“gross”) size of the inequality. A”democratic republic” conflates the distinction between a “republican government” and a “constitutional democracy” – important, but not terribly useful in this context. The strongly trochaic “simply”not only reinforces the proposition in the verb clause that follows but adds a second, vital, hidden assertion to it: the harm gross inequality causes is very easy to grasp. Finally,”can’t exist”explicitly warns that gross material inequality is an existential threat to America.
I’m sure that you folks – many of you far more talented writers than I am – can do much, much better. William Forbath does have a great idea. Rather than wasting our time criticizing crackpot originalism – which confers upon it a status it doesn’t deserve – liberals need to better articulate independent alternatives. However, the way he expressed himself was not terribly articulate. It really is the rhetoric, people.
The 17 House Democrats who voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal contempt last week have received more than $1.3 million in financial aid from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee since the start of 2009, a review of campaign finance records shows. That total constitutes roughly one out of every nine dollars that the committee either spent or earmarked for candidates during that time period.
The aid isn’t atypical for the campaign committee, whose priority is numerical majorities rather than ideological purity.
“The DCCC is a member participation organization that supports Democrats for Congress with the goal of electing a Democratic majority,” said Jesse Ferguson, a spokesperson for the DCCC.
But with anger mounting among the Democrats over the GOP’s treatment of Holder, the money breakdown threatens to re-ignite a long-simmering debate over what type of lawmakers are best suited to fill the party’s ranks. The 17 Democrats who voted to hold Holder in contempt for the invoking of executive privilege in the Operation Fast and Furious investigation did so under pressure from the National Rifle Association. Their votes demonstrate the gun lobby’s continued power within the halls of Congress, while raising the question of why the DCCC lacks that same institutional clout.
In addition, seven of those 17 Democrats have said they either are skipping the party’s convention this summer or remain unsure of their intentions. One member has declined to endorse President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign.
Isn’t that just terrific?
Here’s Howie:
“[DCCC Chairman Steve Israel] is spending gargantuan amounts of money and energy on hopeless Blue Dogs … [rather] than working on winnable campaigns for independent-minded, progressive Democrats,” said Howie Klein, the co-founder of Blue America PAC, an organization devoted to promoting progressive candidates.
“Those 17 Democrats didn’t just suddenly join [Rep. Darrell] Issa’s witch hunt and stray from the Democratic fold. All 17 — no exceptions — are among the Democrats who vote with [Speaker John] Boehner and [House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor most frequently for the far right’s anti-family agenda.”
This is the truth. There are winnable campaigns out there that could really use some help. But these people are throwing good money after bad to elect people who won’t even commit to voting for the Speaker. This is a huge problem that relates to my earlier post suggesting that professional Republicans and Democrats alike believe that the most conservative candidate is always the best.
If you’d rather not have your money going to candidates like this, you can give to Blue America instead. We think progressives have a right to some representation in the government too.
